Wednesday, April 09, 2008

"Philosophy, Practices and the Practice of Philosophy," Université de Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, December 8, 2007; March 15, 2008; May 10, 2008.

Philosophy is often regarded as an essentially speculative discipline, opposed in this respect to the realm of practices. But in numerous cases, it is not possible to extract philosophy from its relationship to a practice or a set of practices. One might, for instance, think of metaphysics whose very development has sometimes been seen as depending on the state of our scientific knowledge. Or, similarly, in ethics the relation to practice has a direct influence on the methodology that is deployed. This closeness of philosophy to practices is so pervasive that some have gone as far as to suggest that philosophy itself might be a type of practice, thereby reviving a conception of philosophy that was more familiar to the Ancients, or even nothing but a form of action.
This questioning of the relation between philosophy and practices is all the more striking today that knowledge is no longer considered as something given, resting on putative a priori foundations as provided by philosophy. If it is not from philosophy that knowledge gains its foundations, what then could be philosophy’s role if not that of being a practice of some kind? It is therefore ultimately in a methodological relation to knowledge, and not as a foundational prolegomenon, that philosophy can find its rightful place as a practice within a web of practices.
We propose three one-day conferences that will each examine an aspect of the relationship between philosophy and practices understood in a broad sense. The first day, on the theme “Science, a Model for Metaphysics?”, asks to what extent the practice of science impacts metaphysical constructions. The second day, "Goethe-Lichtenberg-Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Psychology, Natural Sciences," examines the interface between philosophy as a practice, psychology and natural science through a dialogue between Goethe, Lichtenberg and Wittgenstein. The third day, "Ethics without Principles: the Diversity of Contexts of Moral Particularism," on the diversity of contexts of moral particularism, asks how practices might ground ethics in the absence of foundations by principles.
Further information is here: http://meliparen.blogspot.com/.

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)